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Maria Popova: Wisdom in the Age of Information and the Importance of Storytelling in Making Sense of the World

If you plan on sticking around this Internet place, you’ll soon find out that one of my all-time favourite blogs when it comes to life as we know it (or not) is Brain Pickings by Maria Popova (who happens to be a Bulgarian as well). Her writing style, ability to push one’s mind to think beyond the visible things and curator skills are absolutely brilliant and every time I visit her page, I end up leaving feeling enriched.

The thing I love about her is that unlike many of the mass blogs we’re all reading (and I’m not denying that their existence is often useful), you’ll rarely find chewed/rewritten news which are currently circulating the web.

Anyhow, the reason I’m writing this post is a beautifully animated essay written by her which addresses the future of story telling & the increasing gap between information availability and knowledge in our society.

I am far from the idea I can really expand on the topic, but what I would like to stress on is one of the thing she pins in her essay – the increasing social pressure of being informed about ANYTHING and EVERYWHERE. As our brain capacity is limited, this information overflow and desire to be able to say at least a not-so-dumb sentence on any topic possible results into having a vast, but very shallow understanding of things around us. As much as I myself also try to have a general knowledge about… life, being able to deep dive into a certain topic and become an expert is highly valuable nowadays.

Transcript of the essay:

We live in a world awash with information, but we seem to face a growing scarcity of wisdom. And what’s worse, we confuse the two. We believe that having access to more information produces more knowledge, which results in more wisdom. But, if anything, the opposite is true — more and more information without the proper context and interpretation only muddles our understanding of the world rather than enriching it.

This barrage of readily available information has also created an environment where one of the worst social sins is to appear uninformed. Ours is a culture where it’s enormously embarrassing not to have an opinion on something, and in order to seem informed, we form our so-called opinions hastily, based on fragmentary bits of information and superficial impressions rather than true understanding.

“Knowledge,” Emerson wrote, “is the knowing that we can not know.”

To grasp the importance of this, we first need to define these concepts as a ladder of understanding.

At its base is a piece of information, which simply tells us some basic fact about the world. Above that is knowledge — the understanding of how different bits of information fit together to reveal some truth about the world. Knowledge hinges on an act of correlation and interpretation. At the top is wisdom, which has a moral component — it is the application of information worth remembering and knowledge that matters to understanding not only how the world works, but also how it should work. And that requires a moral framework of what should and shouldn’t matter, as well as an ideal of the world at its highest potentiality.

This is why the storyteller is all the more urgently valuable today.

A great storyteller — whether a journalist or editor or filmmaker or curator — helps people figure out not only what matters in the world, but also why it matters. A great storyteller dances up the ladder of understanding, from information to knowledge to wisdom. Through symbol, metaphor, and association, the storyteller helps us interpret information, integrate it with our existing knowledge, and transmute that into wisdom.

Susan Sontag once said that “reading sets standards.” Storytelling not only sets standards but, at its best, makes us want to live up to them, to transcend them.

A great story, then, is not about providing information, though it can certainly inform — a great story invites an expansion of understanding, a self-transcendence. More than that, it plants the seed for it and makes it impossible to do anything but grow a new understanding — of the world, of our place in it, of ourselves, of some subtle or monumental aspect of existence.

At a time when information is increasingly cheap and wisdom increasingly expensive, this gap is where the modern storyteller’s value lives.

I think of it this way:

Information is having a library of books on shipbuilding. Knowledge applies that to building a ship. Access to the information — to the books — is a prerequisite for the knowledge, but not a guarantee of it.

Once you’ve built your ship, wisdom is what allows you to sail it without sinking, to protect it from the storm that creeps up from the horizon in the dead of the night, to point it just so that the wind breathes life into its sails.

Moral wisdom helps you tell the difference between the right direction and the wrong direction in steering the ship.

A great storyteller is the kindly captain who sails her ship with tremendous wisdom and boundless courage; who points its nose in the direction of horizons and worlds chosen with unflinching idealism and integrity; who brings us somewhat closer to the answer, to our particular answer, to that grand question: Why are we here?

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Just random thoughts on life, marketing, tech, health, travel experiences and music. Time is a scarce resource, but every once in a while I feel the need to write about something else than just music review and... this blog came along.